The Art Of Conversation 谈吐的艺术(4)

But if British liberals were keen on free speech, they were much less preoccupied than their French contemporaries were with its forms and flourishes. Dr Johnson was considered so great a talker that a contemporary compared his conversation to Titian's painting. But he also could sit stonily silent through a dinner that bored him, or contradict and interrupt in defiance of all common etiquette. Even Boswell, his devoted note-taker, acknowledged his "dogmatic roughness of manner".

但凡英国的自由派对自由演讲心存渴望，他们就会在形式（方面）和繁荣（程度）上比法国同时代人少形成一些偏见。Johnson博士被认为是如此伟大的一位言谈家，其会话与同一时代的Titan的绘画一样伟大。但Johnson博士同样也能在无聊的晚餐时分静如坐石、一语不发，或者违背所有的惯常礼仪，插话反驳，出言不逊。Johnson博士忠实的记录员Even Boswell认为他是"作风粗旷、固执独断"。

Strong and silent

强力与沉默

Johnson was far from the only Englishman to have matched a love of conversation with a reputation for occasional difficult silences. As he himself said: "A Frenchman must always be talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content when he has nothing to say." In his book "Democracy in America", Alexis de Tocqueville refers to the "strange unsociability and reserved and taciturn disposition of the English". But for Charles Dickens, another foreign visitor to America in the 19th century, it was the Americans who seemed taciturn. He blamed this on a "love of trade", which limited men's interests and made them reluctant to volunteer information for fear of tipping their hand to a competitor. The idealisation of silence remained strong in American culture into the 20th century: think of the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.

Johnson远不只是唯一一个在对言谈的喜爱上和常常是艰难的科学上两者上有着两项媲美的声誉的英国人。就像他自己说的："一个法国人必须经常的谈论不休，也不管自己对那些事情知道还是不知道；一个英国人则在他无话可说的情况下感到自我满足"。在他的《美国的民主》一书中，亚历西斯•德•托克维尔（Alexis de Tocqueville）提及了"奇怪的非社交化、沉默寡言和对英语的兴味索然"。至于狄更斯（Charles Dickens），另一位在19世纪到访过美国的外国人，在他说来——美国人似乎都不爱讲话。他将之归咎于对"贸易的爱"限制了人们的兴趣，让他们不愿意自愿提供信息，担心那会向对手摊了牌。在美国文化进入20世纪后，其中的理想化的沉默仍然很强烈：想想西部片里头（讲起话来）言简意赅的英雄或者海明威的小说。

More recently it has been neither trade nor taciturnity, but the distractions of technology, which have seemed to threaten the quality of conversation. George Orwell complained in 1946 that "in very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent." The television attracted similar comment when it became commonplace two decades later.

最近，并不是或者贸易或者沉默寡言的，而似乎是技术上的心不在焉威胁到了交谈的质量。乔治奥威尔（George Orwell）在1946年抱怨到"在许许多多英语家庭，电台基本上是从来就没有关掉过。这显然是有所企图的。音乐让交谈无法严肃起来、或者更加连贯有条理起来"。在20年之后变得普及的电视也受到了类似的批评。

In 2006 an American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art", in which he worried that "neither digital music players nor computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that effect." A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it "striking" that past generations would "speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might speak of an evening spent browsing the internet".

2006年，美国随笔作家Stephen Miller出版了《交谈：一种衰退艺术的历史》，在书中，他担心"不管是数码音乐播放器还是电脑，发明出来都不是为了帮助人们逃避真实的对话，但它们却起了这样的作用"。一位评论家在Miller先生的书中发现，他"狠狠的敲打"：过去的几代人"谈到晤谈上来时，晤谈就像是一种寻找乐趣的方式；那更像现代美国人可能谈到的是一整晚都花在浏览互联网上"。

Conversation has survived worse challenges (Johnson thought it might be killed by a return of religious zealotry), and it will doubtless survive more. For evidence that it thrives still, go into any smart New York restaurant, where the noise level will be deafening. Or go into a Barnes & Noble or Borders bookshop and look at the shelves of manuals on how to talk better. Most of them are aimed at people who want to talk more persuasively and engagingly in order to get on in their careers, not at people who want to engage in conversation for the sheer pleasure it affords. But these motivations are far from exclusive. Making friends and influencing people, to borrow the language of Dale Carnegie, amount in the end to much the same thing. Both of them require charm, courtesy and the desire to understand the ideas and opinions of others. And whatever the strategic objective, those will never be bad tactics.

交谈从更严峻的挑战中生存下来（Johnson认为，交谈可能被宗教狂热的回潮扼死），而它也还毫无疑问的活得更好。交谈仍然是兴盛繁荣证据就是：随意走进了一家纽约小餐馆中，噪音的水平都会高到喧天闹地。或者你走进Barnes & Noble或者Borders书店，去看一看书架上关于如何更好的谈吐的手册。它们中的大多数都是针对那些只想要自己的事业更上层楼而让谈吐更加令人信服，更加引人入胜的人；而不是针对那些就为了谈话所提供的纯粹的乐趣而参与到谈话中来人。但这些动机也远不是唯一。借用Dale Carnegie的话来说：在结交朋友和影响他人这点上，殊道同归。两者都要求魅力吸人，彬彬有礼，以及渴求理解他人观点和主张。而不管战略性的目的是什么，总归不会是个坏的策略。